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Results: When the Pet Shop Boys met Liza Minnelli
09.27.2017
03:53 pm
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The ‘Results’ cover by David LaChapelle

Whenever I have posted on this blog in the past about her mother Judy Garland, some of our less culturally-enlightened (troglodyte) readers accuse me of having “the musical tastes of a middle-aged drag queen”—so what if I do?—but that’s not going to stop me from recommending a somewhat obscure (in the US at least) 1989 collaboration between Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys.

Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant had already teamed up with Dusty Springfield, providing England’s greatest blue-eyed soul singer with a featured role in their “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” worldwide smash, her first hit single after two decades away from the pop charts, so the Pet Shop Boys producing Liza Minnelli’s comeback album must have seemed like a natural fit. Minnelli, who had not been in the recording studio since 1977, was already a fan of theirs, they of her, so it was apparently a bit of a love affair from the very start, Liza having a demonstrated knack (like her mother before her) for falling for gay men…

The results of the pairing of the chart-topping duo, then at the height of their hit-making powers and the showbiz royalty (who was working around her London concerts with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. during the sessions) were so stellar they opted to call the album Results, in keeping with the one word nomenclature customary for PSB releases. The material, cannily selected with Minnelli’s own tabloid-documented experiences—and age, at the time she was 43—in mind came together to sound exactly like what you’d think it would sound like with Minnelli’s iconic powerful/tender/vulnerable/triumphant voice placed atop typical (but by no means second rate) Pet Shop Boys symphonic electronic disco beats. Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti and Anne Dudley from the Art of Noise did the orchestral arrangements.
 

 
Originally released in September of 1989, Results went gold in the UK and Spain, with the “Losing My Mind” single hitting number #6 in the British singles chart. In America however, Results didn’t even make the top 100 and it was easy to find the CD for cheap in the cut-out bins not so long after it came out. It remains an undiscovered gem. Results spawned four singles: “Losing My Mind”; “Don’t Drop Bombs”; “So Sorry, I Said” and “Love Pains.” There was also a VHS video EP release titled Visible Results. The by now 28-year-old album has just been given a make-over in the form of a remastered and expanded edition three CD and one DVD box set by Cherry Red Records and hopefully it will (deservedly) pick up some new admirers with this latest iteration.

If you are even slightly curious if the Pet Shop Boys and Liza Minnelli are indeed two great tastes that taste great together, then I am pretty sure that you will love this album. But the beauty of writing about pop culture these days is that you don’t have to take my word for it, you can simply hit play on this clip of Minnelli lip-syncing “Love Pains” and make up your own mind:
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.27.2017
03:53 pm
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The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ was the #1 single 30 years ago. Feel old?
01.21.2016
03:13 pm
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For a certain cohort among our readership, the next sentence will undoubtedly cause a collective sigh, groan, gasp, wince… what have you: It was thirty years ago this month that the Pet Shop Boys single “West End Girls” became #1 on the UK music charts and soon thereafter in America too.

That information came to me via the Pet Shop Boys’ Twitter feed this morning and boy did it make me feel old. For whatever dumb reason, I can actually recall exactly where I was when I first heard the tune myself.

And then I realized that this “certain cohort” (i.e. people my age) are dwarfed in size, by quite a hefty margin, of our “millennial” readers who would most likely know the song, first and foremost, by its inclusion on the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack in 2013. It’s all relative how we got here, but most people can probably agree that it’s a great song, no matter the decade.
 

 
I was fortunate enough to see the Pet Shop Boys, in their prime, on their world tour of 1991 during a two-night, sold-out stand at Radio City Music Hall. It was an amazing spectacle, very much along the lines of an extremely elaborate Broadway musical, an all-singing, all-dancing over-the-top extravaganza that saw Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe traipsing through their greatest hits in a tightly choreographed two-hour set with an intermission. Practically every other song was a production number with a different scenario, setting and costumes. (“It’s a Sin,” for instance had horny boarding school boys reading porn mags with flashlights under the bedsheets after the headmaster turns the lights out, before the female dancers enter. In another number Neil Tennant was dressed as Elvis as a bunch of pigs pranced around him.)

The vocals, by Neil Tennant and others, were live, but the music was more or less canned, with an offstage guitarist and keyboardist. Chris Lowe mostly looked dour and said about as much as Harpo Marx, but this is what the fans wanted, of course. I’m sure there might have been a few women there, but my memory of it is that there were very, very few ladies in attendance. (Unlike, I might add, when I saw Maxwell at Radio City a few years later and was probably the only guy in the entire audience.)

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.21.2016
03:13 pm
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Derek Jarman’s videos for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys
12.03.2013
12:57 pm
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The Queen Is Dead
Still from ‘The Queen Is Dead’

I only recently learned that the singular British polymath artist Derek Jarman, director of Caravaggio, Blue, and Jubilee, directed a bunch of music videos in the 1980s, including several for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, which is a perfect fit when you think about it.

The Smiths, “Ask”

 
This 12-minute short movie, already tackled for DM by Paul Gallagher in 2012, is called The Queen Is Dead—basically it’s three videos strung together for the title track, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic”:

 
Both of Jarman’s videos for Pet Shop Boys were for their second album, Actually
 
Pet Shop Boys, “It’s a Sin”

 
Pet Shop Boys, “Rent”

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee,’ a strange and essential punk era document
‘The Queen Is Dead’: Derek Jarman’s film for The Smiths, from 1986

Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.03.2013
12:57 pm
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‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’: The Pet Shop Boys’ rarely seen feature film from 1988

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‘What did you do in the 1980s, Daddy?’  For those who want to know what it was like to be young(ish) and middle class in Britain during the 1980s, then take a look at the Pet Shop Boys in their one-and-only feature film, It Couldn’t Happen Here. Originally planned as an hour long pop promo to accompany the release of their third album Actually, It Couldn’t Happen Here captures the style, the pretensions, the cultural obsessions and some of the most popular music of that decade.

The Pet Shop Boys are a hugely under-rated band, whose compelling, beautiful and catchy music by Chris Lowe, can often disguise the power and passion of Neil Tennant’s lyrics. For you see, despite what the music press claims (that means you NME), or the modes by which the band present themselves (daft hats and outfits), there is really nothing ironic about the Pet Shop Boys at all. They mean everything they do. Which is why It Couldn’t Happen Here is so frustrating. It could have been like The Monkees Head for the 1980s, with a hard, political edge, but it wanders without any sense of direction through a series of segments that revolve too literally around the songs.

That said, for a pop film it’s not all that bad, and the quality of the songs, and some of the eye-catching performances (Joss Ackland, Gareth Hunt, Barbara Windsor) make it almost passable. If only Derek Jarman (who collaborated on a stage show, and directed the promo for “It’s A Sin”) or Lindsay Anderson (the director of If… and O, Lucky Man! who would had directed the concert film of Wham, yes, Wham, in China) had been asked to direct rather than Jack Bond, then things might have been different. Even so, Bond made it look sumptuous and Neil Tennant found out he couldn’t act.

Time methinks to release the film on DVD.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.18.2012
08:40 pm
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Gorgeous classical meets electronic poster series by Hyejung Bae
02.28.2011
02:43 pm
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Simply stunning work entitled “Music Concert Series” by Los Angeles-based artist Hyejung Bae. The Yellow Magic Orchestra poster is my favorite.

Poster series for a concert of electronic musicians playing classical music with digital instruments. Newspaper illustrations from the 1800’s combine with contemporary optical patterns to represent the timeless value of classical music and its digital interpretation

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One more after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.28.2011
02:43 pm
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Minipops Pet Shop Boys: Two young boys lipsync ‘Go West’ as Neil and Chris!
07.14.2010
06:24 pm
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This is so wrong on so many levels that it’s positively right…

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.14.2010
06:24 pm
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